• No results found

'Local site and historical depth': Briggflatts, A Drunk Man, and British Modernist poetics of place

N/A
N/A
Protected

Academic year: 2020

Share "'Local site and historical depth': Briggflatts, A Drunk Man, and British Modernist poetics of place"

Copied!
46
0
0

Loading.... (view fulltext now)

Full text

(1)

Abstract:

This article aims to present new understandings of how place, identity, and text are

configured in British modernist poetry, particularly in the extended poem. Focusing chiefly

on Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966), the discussion explores this poem’s alignment of

geography and history as sources of identity, noting a stark contrast with the kinds of

rootlessness more readily associated with the Poundian long poem. Bunting can be seen to

marshal a variety of spatio-temporal signifiers to convey a located identity, and it is

demonstrated that Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) enacts

similar processes more explicitly. MacDiarmid and Bunting’s historicised and located writing

is briefly contrasted with Louis Zukofsky’s depthless language, which carries conflicting

spatial implications. William Carlos Williams’s Paterson is then discussed as representing an

American poetics of place that shows key commonalities with Bunting, but works with a

distinct conception of history. Ultimately, it is argued that Bunting and MacDiarmid can be

viewed as typifying a specifically British modernism, even whilst complicating and

interrogating notions of Britishness. Their shared poetics of place are concerned with

maintaining roots in the local site, but also asserting Northumbrian and Scottish

nationalisms.

‘Local site and historical depth’: Briggflatts, A Drunk Man, and British

Modernist Poetics of Place

An interesting effect of Basil Bunting’s publishing history is that he has seemed at different

(2)

Pound’ for a large part of his career,1 Bunting is the only British writer in Louis Zukofsky’s An

‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932), his work placed alongside that of American and

internationalist émigré modernists: Pound and Zukofsky, as well as T. S. Eliot, George Oppen,

Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, and others.2 Upon the publication of

Briggflatts (1966), however, Bunting seems suddenly repatriated as a senior peer of the

‘British Poetry Revival’,3 and one of an earlier generation of British modernists, awaiting

reinstatement in a revised canon.4 In this guise, Bunting is grouped with David Jones and

Hugh MacDiarmid by Sarah Broom, Donald Davie, Peter Finch, Eric Homberger, Eric

Mottram, and Peter Quartermain, to name a few instances.5 Broom characterises the three

writers as ‘neglected British modernist poets’, which usefully sums up the way the grouping

is generally used – as invoking a canon of overshadowed modernists specific to a British

context, and thus distinguishable from other pedigrees of modernist. Importantly though,

are Bunting, Jones, and MacDiarmid ‘British modernist poets’ simply because they are

1 Donald Davie, With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry (Manchester: Carcanet

Press, 1998), p. 292. The same phrase is used by John Seed, ‘An English Objectivist?: Basil Bunting’s Other England’, Chicago Review, 44.3-4 (1998), 114-26 (p. 114).

2 An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, ed. by Louis Zukofsky (Folcroft: Folcroft Library Editions, 1975).

3 Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool

University Press, 2005), pp. 37-54.

4 Sarah Broom, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 223-24 5 Broom, pp. 223-24; Davie, With the Grain, p. 217; Peter Finch, ‘British Poetry Since 1945’ (2001)

<http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/enc.htm> [accessed 13 May 2016]; Eric Homberger, The Art of the Real: Poetry

in England and America Since 1939 (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), p. 179; Eric Mottram, ‘Basil Bunting: Human

(3)

modernist poets from Britain, or is it necessary to theorise a ‘British modernism’, with a

distinct history and set of tendencies?

In order to address this question, the current article will focus specifically on Bunting

and MacDiarmid’s contributions to the development of the long modernist poem,

connecting Briggflatts to MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). Beginning

to trace the key distinctions between their use of the form and its more familiar

characteristics in American modernism, I will show that the British modernist long poem

involves rootedness in landscape as a key source of identity. This is in direct contrast with the

Poundian long poem, whose key techniques are evocative of rootlessness and geographical

mobility. Full consideration of a wide range of long poems is beyond the scope of this article,

but it suffices to note the critical commonplace that Pound’s ideogrammatic method, in its

rapid juxtaposition of materials, can be seen to disturb any sense of a stable geographical

setting. Zukofsky’s “A”, meanwhile, frequently works with a sense of linguistic depthlessness

which resists the idea of a historically and geographically located poetics.

Having expounded a model through which Bunting and MacDiarmid’s configuration

of place, text, and identity can be understood, I will briefly consider Zukofsky’s attitude to

language, showing how the British modernist writers work with a model of surface and

depth that is alien to the form of modernism Zukofsky typifies. Finally, I will turn to

Williams’s Paterson in order to address a specifically American poetics of place which

complicates the distinction between rootedness and rootlessness. I will suggest how

Williams intertwines identity and place in a way comparable to Bunting, but works with a

different conception of history. As a whole, the discussion will contribute to an

Journal, 1995), pp. 71-82 (p. 71); Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis

(4)

understanding of a British modernist poetics of place departing from American counterparts.

Part of what will be demonstrated is that the British poets utilise processes of

historical and geographical rooting in order to strengthen positions that are supposedly

marginal to a dominant English/British centre. Through the relation of identity to specific

places, the poets attempt a reconstruction of prevailing and homogenising notions of British

space, and this is part of what defines a British modernist poetics of place. As Neil Corcoran

notes of Jones’s poetry, an ‘alienating otherness is strategic, intended to make the reader

painfully aware of the cultural, political and linguistic diversity of which the “Great Britain” of

the post-war period is in fact composed’.6 It must then be noted that the concept of ‘British

modernism’ is used here as a critical convenience to describe these three writers from

across the British Isles who typify a poetics of place focused on historicised national

identities. Those national identities are emphatically not ‘British’ – indeed their poetic

expression signifies a refusal to be subsumed by such an umbrella term. It would be more

accurate, though less convenient, to describe Bunting as a Northumbrian modernist,

MacDiarmid as a Scottish modernist, and indeed Jones as a Welsh modernist. Yet it remains

that their shared tendencies in expressing those specific modernisms justify the use of a

single, if flawed term that acknowledges their commonalities whilst naming the composite

identity they implicitly problematise.

Briggflatts, Biography, and the Poetics of Historicised Sites

The extended poetic text is evidently crucial to understanding modernist poetics and,

therefore, to defining the nature of British modernism as a discrete category. David Perkins

(5)

the new poetry of the 1950s and 1960s’, and that this succession can be observed in ‘the

Modernist long poem’.7 He goes on to argue that ‘this genre begins with The Waste Land

(1922) and the first sixteen Cantos (1925)’, and continues in Eliot’s Four Quartets and the

rest of Pound’s Cantos. The genre is then developed by Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s

The Maximus Poems, and Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, ushering in a more flexible version of the

form, in which context Perkins views Briggflatts and Jones’s The Anathemata.8 In her study,

On the Modernist Long Poem, Margaret Dickie disagrees on the genre’s central figures,

grouping Pound, Eliot, and Williams with Hart Crane. Yet, her definition is perhaps loose

enough usefully to encompass multiple perspectives: she says that the phrase ‘the

Modernist long poem’, ‘for all its inadequacies as a designation, has the merit of

distinguishing the salient feature of this otherwise unidentifiable genre’.9

Defining a specific poetics of place within this variable terrain, I will begin by

analysing the ways in which Briggflatts relates identity to place. Bunting’s concern with

history and time is crucial to this, and I will suggest that the environments he evokes are

mediated through the use of a cluster of signs and symbols invested with historical and

cultural meaning. I will then show how MacDiarmid makes explicit a similar process of

exploring a geographically specific identity through a series of cultural references. The

located identity written by each poet is possible because of purposeful invocation of

historical depths specific to geographical sites. Both undertake an excavation of the local site

6 Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (Harlow: Longman, 1993), p. 34.

7 David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Volume 2: Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 212.

8 Perkins, p. 212.

(6)

and form a set of signifiers which invoke that site. The language of the poem itself is at times

made a visible part of that network of signification. In this way, Bunting and MacDiarmid

each position a located identity not just in relation to what we might call a spatial breadth,

but in relation to a meeting point of that breadth with an historical depth.

Initially, it may seem that Briggflatts constructs a written identity in relation to time

rather than place. Briggflatts is subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, and thus it deliberately calls

attention to that fact that it constructs a written identity through its narrative.10 That

narrative proceeds through a five-part structure, which Bunting explicates in a number of

ways, claiming a parallel with the musical form of a sonata,11 making an analogy with the

four seasons of the year,12 and citing a symmetrical diagram of climaxes that he supposedly

drew before writing the poem.13 Each of these ideas implies a view of the biographised self

as heavily structured and formed cumulatively through progression and development. To

illustrate this, we might focus on the idea of a seasonal structure, which is the most evident

from an initial reading of the poem. In fact, the seasons are directly suggested as a

structuring principle at various points in the poem – for example, ‘Guilty of spring / and

spring’s ending / amputated years ache’ (p. 16).

The idea of the self as structured seasonally suggests that selfhood is experienced as

temporal progression through a series of defined phases, and this implication is echoed in

10 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (1966; repr. Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2009), p. 9. All references to the poem itself will

use this edition.

11 Ibid., p. 8; see also Victoria Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991), pp.

147-76.

(7)

the poem’s fundamental assumption that it makes sense to explain identity through a

narrative biography divided into distinct sections. More than this, the idea of a seasonal

progression suggests that selfhood is cyclical, and thus it universalises selfhood and posits it

as commonly experienced. In commenting on his use of this device, Bunting makes this

universalising clearer, whilst also tying the idea of cyclical selfhood to his use of mythical and

historical figures:

Commonplaces provide the poem’s structure: spring, summer, autumn, winter of the

year and of man’s life. . . . Love and betrayal are spring’s adventures. . . . In the

summer there is no rest from ambition and lust of experience, never final. Those fail

who try to force their destiny, like Eric; but those who are resolute to submit, like my

version of Pasiphae, may bring something new to birth.14

As the universalising phrase ‘man’s life’ suggests, Bunting’s seasonal motif posits the self as

an essential and commonly experienced temporal event. This view of selfhood as a universal

temporal cycle makes history (Eric Bloodaxe) and myth (Pasiphae) a store of lessons about

the self, so that ‘man’ progresses by accumulating self-knowledge, just as Bunting’s

autobiography proceeds as a logical development of self-awareness and reflection. The

seasonal device, then, allows the personal timeline of Bunting’s narrative to be connected to

a more public timeline of history.

It may at first seem useful to contrast Bunting’s stress on narrative time with a more

13 Basil Bunting, Peter Quartermain, and Warren Tallman, ‘Basil Bunting Talks About Briggflatts’, Agenda, 16.1

(1978), 8-19.

(8)

spatial approach. The Poundian long poem generally lacks the extended narrative continuity

we might link to a temporal progression, and it seems that this axis has been displaced by a

spatial one that allows the self to be constructed within a series of rapid movements. Yet,

Bunting seeks to tie selfhood as a progression through time directly to selfhood as a

continuous experience of places. So, he asserts that the seasonal structure has a spatial logic

as well as a temporal one: ‘Spring is around Briggflatts, Summer is all over the place –

London, the Arctic, the Mediterranean. Autumn is mostly in the Dales, and the last part is

mostly on the Northumberland coast’.15 The temporal and narrative progression of self from

childhood through adulthood to old age is accompanied by a geographical movement from a

place of home through a wandering exploration that results in a return. This is evidenced in

the text, so that, for example, Bunting’s view of summer as providing ‘no rest from ambition

and lust of experience’16 is reflected in the poem’s second section precisely by rapid

movements, syntactical and geographical, whose parataxis is reminiscent of Pound’s

ideogrammatic method:

No tilled acre, gold scarce,

walrus tusk, whalebone, white bear’s liver.

Scurvy gnaws, steading smell, hearth’s crackle.

Crabs, shingle, seracs on the icefall.

Summer is bergs and fogs, lichen on rocks. (p. 18)

As Victoria Forde recognises, quoting the same comments as above, ‘[t]he chronological

15 ‘Bunting Talks’, p. 15.

(9)

movement through the parts eventually became symbolic of the stages of a lifetime,

involving spatial as well as chronological progression’.17 Similarly, Quartermain notes that

‘the chronological structure . . . does involve a spatial movement’: this becomes particularly

clear when the culmination of both axes, in a ‘Winter’ ‘mostly on the Northumberland

coast’, marks – as Quartermain comments to Bunting – a decision ‘to turn back into your

own Spring’.18 By tying the terminus of a temporal cycle (Winter) to that of spatial one

(home), Briggflatts makes more overt the way in which its autobiography maps selfhood

through both geographical and temporal movements.

The reason I have made a distinction between what we might call temporal and

geographical axes of identity is not to suggest rigidly that a text must stress one or the other

over an intersection of the two, but rather to suggest that the two intersect in Briggflatts in

a way that we may not expect from a modernist text. By interweaving place and time and

defining the self in terms of a logical relationship to both, Briggflatts seems to sustain

selfhood as a rational and whole entity, and this goes against the characteristically modernist

sense of experience as fractured. That unexpected wholeness is implicit in the poem’s

structure, and Corcoran hints at this in noting that ‘binding motifs give Briggflatts an

exceptional coherence for a Modernist long poem’.19 Jeffrey Wainwright goes further,

commenting that Bunting’s claim of a poem’s structure preceding its linguistic contents

would seem to contradict our familiar supposition about modernist technique that it

is precisely a lack of confidence, of grasp upon the world, that results in

17 Forde, p. 210.

(10)

fragmentation, (shored against ruins); that a method of juxtaposing various materials

is made necessary by an inability to hold increasingly disparate and complex

experience within controlled organisation and statement or within the order of

narrative.20

Bunting’s confidence in poetic structure is linked to a discourse that understands selfhood as

heavily and rationally structured. It is by closely relating history and place as axes of identity,

and by therefore understanding the self as ‘at one’ with the historicised landscape, that

Briggflatts dispels any sense of the self being made up of ‘increasingly disparate and

complex experience’.

The relationship of self to place and time occurs not only in the overall way in which

the poem structures itself as an autobiography, but also consistently throughout the poem in

ways that I will now discuss. I do not wish to suggest that the critical reception of Briggflatts

as a modernist poem needs to be rethought; rather, I wish to demonstrate how British

modernism is able to maintain coherence of identity in terms of a temporal framework

because it is able to root the self within the historical depth of specific geographical sites.

The way in which the reliance on located identities allows British modernist poets to

constitute their own distinct canon is hinted at by Quartermain, who argues that ‘[Bunting’s]

very Northumbrianness . . . served to separate him from the English koiné and from the

English modernist tradition’, tying him instead to a ‘reinvention (with Hugh MacDiarmid and

David Jones) of an older and regional poetic strain’.21

Focusing on the first section of the poem, I now wish to illustrate some of the ways in

(11)

which place and time both feed into Briggflatts’s autobiographical subject. In terms of

explaining that self through a temporally progressive narrative, Briggflatts functions initially

by establishing in its first section a fragment of narrative that depicts the speaker as a youth

in an idealised relationship with a female character. This section is the ‘Spring’ of the poem’s

seasonal structure, and Stefan Hawlin describes it by way of reference to depictions of Eden,

to Blake’s conception of ‘Innocence’, and to Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’.22 The comparison

with Wordsworth becomes useful when we consider Patrick H. Hutton’s argument that

Wordsworth’s The Prelude ‘reflects the newfound sense of history of the modern age, one

that owes considerable debt to an emerging notion of the developing self’.23 Hutton clarifies

this by saying that the key to understanding this development

lies not in the salient events that mark the flow of Wordsworth’s life history on the

surface of his narrative, but, rather, in the arresting moments of self-illumination that

reveal its psychological substructure. These were the unforgettable moments that he

called ‘spots of time’. . . . Through all the reorderings, displacements, and conflations

of his versions of The Prelude, these remained fixed points.24

Like Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, the scenes depicted in the first section of Briggflatts are

preserved as fixed reference points on a developmental temporal trajectory of self-growth

and self-reflection. This is signalled by the recurrent reflection upon them in later parts of

22 Stefan Hawlin, ‘Bunting’s “Briggflatts”: A Quaker Masterpiece’, Modern Language Review, 94.3 (1999),

635-46.

(12)

the poem, but also by the fact that the whole opening section is biography in third-person,

preserved at a distance from the immediate first-person of the rest of the poem. The

opening of The Prelude, intriguingly, is in present tense, in contrast to the bulk of the

autobiographical text. The immediacy of Wordsworth’s remembered self is thus increased

while Bunting’s is reduced, but the effect of formally separating a past self, and past

interactions with landscape, is nonetheless shared by the two poets. Bunting’s opening ends

with the collapse of the idealised romantic relationship, and from this point of departure the

poem can be understood as the narration of the speaker’s time-based self-development,

which occurs along the lines universalised by the seasonal motif.

If Briggflatts’s time-based trajectory of development is interwoven with a spatially

motivated one, one way in which this is achieved is that the poem’s first section recalls not

only a relationship with a lover, but also with a place of home. The two are tied together in a

direct conflation that makes explicit how the interweaving of place and time roots the self in

a particular landscape. As Dennis Brown argues, ‘Bunting’s [muse] is of the earth, earthly:

her genitals are “thatch”ed, her girdle “greased with lard”. Here woman is local, natural

wholesome and simple. She is “home”’.25 Brown’s comments make clear this interweaving,

and they incidentally highlight the questionable gender dynamics at work in Bunting’s

poetics of place. The quotations Brown uses are from the two points in Briggflatts where

this conflation occurs most obviously. The first appears in the following passage from the

first section:

Sour rye porridge from the hob

25 Dennis Brown, ‘Basil Bunting: Briggflatts’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, ed.

(13)

with cream and black tea,

meat, crust and crumb.

Her parents in bed

the children dry their clothes.

He has untied the tape

of her striped flannel drawers

before the range. Naked

on the pricked rag mat

his fingers comb

thatch of his manhood’s home. (p. 15)

By following the sentimental description of a domestic scene with a description of the girl’s

pubic hair as ‘thatch of his manhood’s home’, Bunting ties her directly to that domestic

scene – she is, figuratively, an idealised thatched cottage he occupies. This conflation

depends upon a problematically essentialised connection of femininity and domesticity,

whilst reinforcing that connection through the well-worn trope of vagina-as-domicile.26

Tied to the poem’s conception of ‘home’, the girl is therefore also conflated with the

landscape and locale on which the first section focuses. This is made clear later in the poem,

in the second passage from which Brown quotes:

The fells reek of her hearth’s scent,

26 Sigmund Freud traces this symbolic connection back into antiquity in A General Introduction to

Psychoanalysis, trans. by G. Stanley Hall (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), Chapter 10: ‘Symbolism in the

(14)

her girdle is greased with lard;

hunger is stayed on her settle, lust in her bed. (p. 28)

The fact that ‘The fells reek of her hearth’s scent’ suggests the way in which Briggflatts’s

conception of ‘home’ and the local site relies not just on the landscape, but on its

associations with the girl’s kitchen, essentialised domesticity, and sexuality. The dual

meanings in this passage make the link between the girl’s sexuality and the domestic scene

more direct: ‘hearth’ conflates the kitchen fire with her sexual organs; ‘her girdle is greased

with lard’ because a ‘girdle’ is ‘an English griddle’ (Briggflatts, p. 38), but at the same time,

of course, we are to imagine a corset lubricated with cooking fat; meanwhile, ‘her settle’

carries erotic meaning, its proximity to ‘her bed’ making ‘hunger’ both sexual and

gastronomic. It is partly because of this conflation of the girl with a place of home that the

speaker’s subsequent movements are able to be both temporal and spatial: he moves

temporally away from the moments of their relationship, arriving at an acceptance of loss

via a time-based biography of self-development; but also he moves spatially away from the

place that she is linked to, and his return to that place is married to the climax of his

personal growth. Tellingly, the speaker’s departure from a feminised home is immediately

expressed in terms of promiscuity, and the ensuing geographical restlessness is echoed by

shifts of attention from ‘whores’ to ‘a slut’s blouse’ to the ‘left breast of a girl’ (p. 17).

That the opening of Briggflatts exists as the idealised reference point of subsequent

spatial and temporal movement signals the coinciding of what I have described as two

opposing axis of identity. Crucially though, the text’s depicted environment acquires a

temporal dimension not only through the speaker’s biography, but also through a greater

(15)

identity that relies on a specific conception of Northumbrian-ness, rooted in the geography

of that place and its history. Brown calls Briggflatts ‘a poem of local site and historical depth’,

and this phrase is useful for the purposes of my discussion because it concisely expresses the

way in which the two axes coincide in order to form a biography.27 Brown applies the same

term to David Jones’s The Anathemata, and in fact I see its implications as crucial to the

workings of the British modernism that Bunting, Jones, and MacDiarmid form.

In the case of Bunting, it is worth noting that his ‘local site’ is Northumbria, not

Northumberland or the North of Britain generally. Bunting consistently makes this clear in

talking about the poem, and the blurb of the latest edition bills him as ‘the Northumbrian

master poet’. This is notable because Northumbria is an historical designation, referring to a

kingdom whose identity and culture have supposedly been subsumed within those of

England and Britain. Collier’s Encyclopedia states that ‘Northumbria was one of seven states .

. . that dominated seventh-century England’, and suggests that its coast, ‘with its monastries

of Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and Monkwearmouth, was the center of Anglo-Saxon civilization’; yet

it also notes that ‘[t]he possibility of a Northumbrian hegemony over the kingdoms of North

Britain was ended by the Pictish victory at Nectansmere in 685’, and that ‘Northumbria

became part of Danelaw [in 876]’.28

By using Northumbria as its local site, Briggflatts challenges prevailing notions of

Britain and England. It reassigns to Northumbria the importance and meaning it once had,

asserting its distinctness of identity and thereby upsetting any homogenising identities that

seek to subsume it. William Wootten glosses this in two ways : firstly he says that ‘the very

construction of that Northumbrian Modernism is contingent not only upon

27 Brown, p. 24.

(16)

Northumbrianism being different from, but also on its subsuming of, English and British

conceptions of identity’; secondly, he argues that ‘Bunting’s Northumbrianism, like any

nationalism, is not opposed to a centre as such, just where that centre happens to be at

present’.29 One purpose of Bunting’s positioning of self in relation to historicised place is,

then, to re-centre and re-shape Britain in terms of how its multiple identities are

represented. As this suggests, British modernism’s poetics of place may be rooted in specific

landscapes but simultaneously interested in reshaping broader conceptions of national

space.

In invoking his local site of Northumbria, Bunting begins with the basic method of

naming a series of places. The poem itself is named after a hamlet in Cumbria, while a river

in that area is named twice in the first page, followed by the places Garsdale, Hawes, and

Stainmore in quick succession (Briggflatts, pp. 13-14). This naming territorially demarcates

the poem’s local site, which is then given historical depth with reference to a variety of

site-specific material, including the Lindisfarne gospels (‘Lindisfarne plaited lines’ (p. 20)), which

Bunting claims as a structural and stylistic precedent of his work,30 and from which the latest

edition of Briggflatts takes its cover image. Bunting also incorporates cultural and historical

references that have associations with other places in Britain, such as the Welsh poets,

Aneirin and Taliesin, who roughly coincide with the peak of Northumbria’s cultural

prominence (p. 27). What this achieves is the establishing of a series of cultural links that go

against the notion of southern England as the cultural ‘centre’ of Britain. Bunting cites the

29 William Wootten, ‘Basil Bunting, British Modernism and the Time of the Nation’, in The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism, ed. by James McGonigal and Richard Price (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000),

pp. 17-34 (pp. 17, 18).

(17)

contexts and peers to which his Northumbrian identity is related historically, and thus

implicitly critiques the sense that this identity is peripheral to a southern centre. In fact, his

remodelling of Britain reinstates an alternative centre that renders the South peripheral, as

Tony Lopez has argued in more detail.31 This strengthens Wootten’s sense of a re-centring of

Britain by Northumbrian nationalism, whose ‘wished for state’ he sees as ‘imbued with or

prefigured by its ancestral history’.32

The figure of Eric Bloodaxe is a particularly important signifier in the historical depth

of Bunting’s Northumbria, being ‘king of Orkney, king of Dublin, twice / king of York’ (p. 21).

Gareth Williams, writing for the BBC on 13th-century Viking sagas, clarifies that ‘Eric’s death

at Stainmore in 954 brought an end to independent Viking rule in Northumbria’.33

Resurrecting ‘the last independent king of Northumbria’,34 Bunting demonstrates how the

located identity of his poem relies on reinstating that cultural independence. Moreover, the

centrality of Bloodaxe to the text underlines that Bunting is consciously working with

Northumbria as an historical designation as well as an immediately experienced landscape.

The use of Bloodaxe allows the history of the self to be linked to the history of Northumbria,

and that linkage occurs as Bloodaxe becomes an alter-ego for the speaker – ‘an

autobiographical screen’ as Keith Tuma puts it.35 The poem’s use of Bloodaxe to represent or

31 See Tony Lopez, ‘Under Saxon the Stone: National Identity in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, in Sharp Study and Long Toil, ed. by Caddel, pp. 114-22 (p. 115).

32 Wootten, p. 29.

33 Gareth Williams, ‘Eric Bloodaxe’ (2009) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/vikings/bloodaxe_01.shtml>

[accessed 13 May 2016].

34 Ibid.

35 Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers

(18)

analogise the poem’s speaker again illustrates how the spatial and temporal meet in that

central identity, and how the Northumbrian place of home is constructed through its history.

Bloodaxe is first mentioned in the following passage:

In Garsdale, dawn;

at Hawes, tea from the can.

Rain stops, sacks

steam in the sun, they sit up.

Copper-wire moustache,

sea-reflecting eyes

and Baltic plainsong speech

declare: By such rocks

men killed Bloodaxe. (p. 14)

This passage invokes a specific locale through the act of naming. The relevance of Bloodaxe

to that site is as part of a history made tangible in physical features of the landscape (‘By

such rocks’). It is presumably the poem’s mason figure (the female lover’s father) who makes

the closing declaration. But, through a shared place and ancestry, the mason and Bloodaxe

are conflated: ‘sea-reflecting eyes / and Baltic plainsong speech’ suggests the Viking king,

but the mason acquires the same characteristics through a connection with the past enabled

by an historicised environment.

At the end of this first section the male youth leaves the feminised home of lover and

locale. As he embarks on that geographical departure, he is conflated with both the mason

(19)

Brief words are hard to find,

shapes to carve and discard:

Bloodaxe, king of York,

king of Dublin, king of Orkney.

Take no notice of tears;

letter the stone to stand

over love laid aside lest

insufferable happiness impede

flight to Stainmore. (p. 16)

The lines ‘shapes to carve and discard’ and ‘letter the stone to stand / over love’ conflate the

poet with the mason, who was inscribing a gravestone earlier in the poem (p. 13). The poem

itself is thereby imagined as an act of physical inscription and commemoration, and the first

‘shapes to [be] carve[d]’ here are in memory of Bloodaxe. The poet is then conflated with

the Viking king too, as the passage can be read as ascribing shared emotions to the two

figures. Their shared emotional experience is closely related to their shared spatial

experience: the emotional journey of both Bloodaxe and the speaker is accompanied by a

geographical journey leaving Northumbria, travelling from place to place, and eventually

returning to the same local site. In the above passage, therefore, the ‘flight’ joins the two

figures in a physical movement, unified by their overlapping within a common territory.

Bloodaxe effectively functions as an historical precedent for the speaker’s spatial experience.

Accordingly, when the speaker is sailing from place to place in the poem’s second section he

(20)

Under his right oxter the loom of his sweep

the pilot turns from the wake.

Thole-pins shred where the oar leans,

grommets renewed tallowed;

halliards frapped to the shrouds.

Crew grunt and gasp. Nothing he sees

they see, but hate and serve. (pp. 17-18)

As Brown argues, Briggflatts may be read as ‘the song of a Modernist “Viking”, plunderer of

experience, who chooses freedom instead of “hearth”’.36 The passage I quoted from the first

section demonstrates how this transformation occurs: namely, through the speaker and

Bloodaxe’s ‘local site and historical depth’.37 The passage allows all three male figures (poet,

mason, and Bloodaxe) to be interrelated through a shared relationship to the historical

depth of the local site, and thus they are loosely united in a specifically masculine persona

that counterparts the essentialised femininity of landscape and lover.

(Dis)located Language: Surface and Depth in Zukofsky

Bunting’s notes to Briggflatts confirm how his focus of Bloodaxe is part of a process of

constructing a Northumbrian identity. The notes do in fact seem largely geared towards

making such things explicit; as Lopez argues,

36 Brown, p. 27.

(21)

the notes themselves reconstruct an ancient Northumbria by harnessing old

north-south divisions and prejudices, mixing up some northern words with others not so

restricted, and presenting a quick check-list of names and texts to establish the basis

for a cultural identity.38

Bunting’s focus on explaining ‘northern words’ is particularly important, because it highlights

that the process of condensing the local site’s historical depth into a network of signifiers at

a linguistic level. Bunting pointedly stresses that his notes act as a glossary, and that the

dialect they explain belongs to an identity that opposes prevailing Englishness: he begins

them by saying ‘[t]he Northumbrian tongue travel has not taken from me sometimes sounds

strange to men used to the koine’, adding that ‘Southrons would maul the music of many

lines in Briggflatts’ (Briggflatts, p. 37). Brown argues that Bunting’s ‘fundamental

word-hoard is composed of historically rooted terms’, adding that ‘[h]is linguistic craft builds up a

textual site where words, as thoughts, constitute one transhistorical continuum’.39 This

‘textual site’, I would argue, functions as a series of references to spatial and temporal points

through which Bunting’s poetics of place relates written identity to an historical depth

beneath geographical and textual surfaces.

The process of constructing a relationship between identity and place through the

textual surface of the poem constitutes the strongest similarity between Bunting and

MacDiarmid, and is key to understanding how British modernism uses a symbolic invocation

of history to construct that relationship. In MacDiarmid this use of the linguistic texture – as

38 Lopez, p. 118.

(22)

a series of references that construct voice and self in relation to place and history – is more

thorough and overt. This is primarily because much of his work is written in Scots, as the

opening dedicatory passage of A Drunk Man – more overtly and densely unfamiliar than any

other part of the poem – makes clear to an uninitiated reader:

Can ratt-rime and ragments o’ quenry

And recoll o’ Gillha’ requite

Your faburdoun, figuration, and gemmell,

And prick-sangs’ delight?40

If we compare MacDiarmid’s use of Scots to that of more recent Scottish poets, we can

better understand how MacDiarmid’s poetic voice is concerned with constructing a located

selfhood, positioned in relation to the history of a specific location. Tom Leonard, for

instance, frequently writes in a form of Scots that corresponds to his Glaswegian dialect and

accent. The self written by the text therefore seems tied to speech acts specific to urban

Scotland.41 Poetic voice, here, is tied to an actual voice and in that way linked to the

experience of a particular area of Britain. This constructs a located identity, but not one that

is obviously sustained by an historicising of that location.

MacDiarmid’s Scots, on the other hand, does not correspond to the speech patterns

of any current or past individual or group, but instead functions as an amalgam of

40 Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), ed. by Kenneth Buthlay (Edinburgh: Scottish

Academic Press, 1987), p. 2. All quotations from the poem will use this edition.

41 See, for example, Tom Leonard, ‘Six Glasgow Poems’, in Intimate Voices: Selected Work 1965-1983

(23)

sourced textual materials, some of which might have been found in the author’s own

speech, but many of which he recovered from dictionaries and other sources, as Davie has

explained.42 In this form of Scots, the poetic voice does not form its identity by

corresponding to someone’s actual linguistic experience, but by interrelating linguistic

fragments from across Scotland’s geography and history. Thus, MacDiarmid constructs an

identity that attempts to speak for Scotland as a whole, maintained as a whole by an overall

geography and history. That MacDiarmid’s linguistic procedures are the foundation for a

purposeful construction of a national identity has been made explicit, since, as Nancy K. Gish

notes, MacDiarmid ‘called for a re-creation of language as a foundation for re-creating a

nation’.43

It might be assumed that British writers writing in English but outside the

conventions of ‘standard English’ are constructing ‘regional’ identities, in whatever sense;

yet, MacDiarmid’s text appears to make little distinction between the diverse regions of

Scotland, or in fact between different time-frames. Recognising the former, Kenneth Buthlay

writes, in editing A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, ‘I have not indicated the demarcation of

regional dialect forms, since . . . the poet in practice ignored such distinctions’ (A Drunk

Man, p. viii). MacDiarmid is concerned with constructing an identity that is located in

Scotland as a whole, made up of the various potential identities of its parts and rooted in

many diverse histories simultaneously. This process is part of MacDiarmid’s valuable

contribution to a British modernism – not because he has much at all to say about

Britishness, but precisely because he is part of a cluster of poets in the British Isles reminding

us of pluralities and contestations that interrupt Britishness. As Wootten helpfully points out:

42 See Donald Davie, Under Briggflatts (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989), p. 14.

(24)

‘forms of British Modernism and the divergent nationalisms, potential nationalisms and

idiosyncratic and unrealisable nationalisms latent within the British state are often closely

connected’.44

Like MacDiarmid’s identification with Scotland, Bunting’s identification with

Northumbria is based on a nationalist reassertion of identity. Bunting also homogenises

various potential histories and localities which would make up contemporary Northumbria,

whilst his use of a northern English set of linguistic reference points to sustain an identity

can similarly be understood as an amalgam of dialects and vocabularies. Once Briggflatts is

seen in light of MacDiarmid’s text, the process of signifying elements of a cultural past in

order to construct a nationally located identity to assert in the present becomes clearer. The

difference between the two poets stems from the fact that Bunting’s Northumbrian national

identity needs to be more fully reconstituted; a Scottish national identity, on the other hand,

is in some senses ready for MacDiarmid to adapt. Both poets, as writers of a national

identity, imply an historical continuity between the biography of a self and the history of a

site. Brown calls this a ‘transhistorical continuum’ in regards to Briggflatts.45 But, in fact,

there is a distinct discontinuity for Bunting, because a large period of Northumbria’s

non-existence must be explained or ignored in order for the relevance of his particular located

identity to be asserted. To sidestep that issue, Bunting naturalises the processes he uses to

locate identity. MacDiarmid, on the other hand, can rely more fully on a continuity in

Scotland’s existence, and can oppositionally assert the current relevance of his located

identity in a less problematic way. It is for this reason that A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle

can afford to make explicit the way in which located identities are constructions. It does this

44 Wootten, p. 17.

(25)

by consciously deconstructing an existing form of Scottishness and subsequently fashioning

another to take its place; in doing so, the poem sheds further light on processes left implicit

by Bunting, and points to key features of a British modernist poetics of place.

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle can in part be understood as an extended

exploration of Scottish nationhood and culture. From the outset it is made clear that this

exploration centres on the way in which self is related to place. MacDiarmid makes this clear

by juxtaposing the speaker’s inability to locate himself immediately – ‘And dinna ken as

muckle’s whaur I am / Or hoo I’ve come to sprawl here ‘neth the mune’ (p. 10) – with the

broader question of locating oneself in relation to the nation. MacDiarmid addresses that

broader question directly in these lines:

(To prove my saul is Scots I maun begin

Wi’ what’s still deemed Scots and the folk expect,

And spire up syne by visible degrees

To heichts whereo’ the fules ha’e never recked[)]. (p. 6)

This stanza begins to link a wider question of Scottishness to the speaker’s problem of

making sense of his experience of place. But also the stanza self-reflexively suggests that this

Scottishness will be constructed within his written voice. The stanza begins a bracketed

section that acts as an aside between writer and reader, self-reflexively signalling how the

poem will begin and how it will progress. The idea of Scottishness is implicated in that

self-reflexivity, and it is suggested that the speaker will construct his Scottishness within the

poem, beginning from stereotyped elements and building up to less obvious ones.

(26)

expect’, it treats that existing conception of Scottish identity as a construct, and playfully

deconstructs it. This begins when the speaker says of Scotch whisky, ‘a’ that’s Scotch aboot it

is the name, / Like a’ thing else ca’d Scottish noodays’ (p. 6). He continues:

You canna gang to a Burns supper even

Wi’oot some wizened scrunt o’ a knock-knee

Chinee turns roon to say, ‘Him Haggis – velly goot!’

And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney. (p. 6)

In this passage MacDiarmid points towards the performative nature of Scottishness,

suggesting that it exists as a series of stock images and actions (Robert Burns, haggis,

bagpipes), which he deconstructs by questioning their supposed authenticity. Yet, at the

same time, the hostile description of ‘a knock-knee / Chinee’ is surely motivated by anger at

perceived cultural appropriation, raising the question of who has the right to perform

nationhood.

MacDiarmid’s deconstruction of a located identity occurs most frequently in the

opening pages of the poem. After this the main focus shifts to MacDiarmid’s subsequent

reconstruction of Scottishness in terms of his own set of signifiers. These signifiers build

upon the ‘re-creation’ of Scottishness that already occurs on a linguistic level.46 The process

is enacted openly and frequently with self-reflexivity, so that the national identity

constructed is, like the stereotyped version, to be understood precisely as a construct.

The most notable signifiers are the moon and the thistle. The predominance of these

(27)

culture is an extension of locating the self within the local site: for almost the entire poem

the speaker is lying on a hillside, next to a thistle and below the moon, so that these images

are features of his immediate location that become symbolic of broader concerns. The exact

meaning of the symbols, their relationship to each other, and their meaning for the speaker

fluctuate continuously, so that within any few pages a number of possibilities are presented:

The munelicht’s like a lookin’-glass,

The thistle’s like mysel’. (p. 22)

I were as happy as the munelicht, withoot care,

But thocht o’ thee – o’ thy contempt and ire –

Turns hauf the warld into the youky thistle there. (p. 24)

For ilka thing a man can be or think or dae

Aye leaves a million mair unbeen, unthocht, undune,

Till his puir warped performance is,

To a’ that micht ha’ been, a thistle to the mune. (p. 24)

The thistle and moon act as blank canvases onto which the speaker projects any number of

fleeting meanings. Yet, the thistle is most consistently identified with ideas of Scottishness,

and this maintains a background presence through all the fluctuations, whilst at times being

made explicit:

(28)

I canna feel it has to dae wi’ me

Mair than a composite diagram o’

Cross-sections o’ my forbears’ organs

. . . .

And yet like bindweed through my clay it’s run,

and a’ my folks’ – it’s queer to see’t unroll.

My ain soul looks me in the face, as ‘twere,

And mair then my ain soul – my nation’s soul! (p. 28)

By using the thistle as a symbol for Scottish identity, yet also as a malleable and

fluctuating symbol, MacDiarmid makes explicit the constructed and unfixed nature of

located identities. This is evident when the rapidly shifting meanings of self, place and

symbol lead to a playful sense of fabrication:

– Am I a thingum mebbe that is kept

Preserved in spirits in a muckle bottle

. . . .

– Mounted on a hillside, wi’ the thistles

. . . .

Or am I juist a figure in a scene

O’ Scottish life A.D. one-nine-two-five? (p. 26)

As Robert Crawford argues, MacDiarmid’s Scottishness ‘might seem a cultural “given”’, but is

(29)

of our ideas about Scottishness’.47 By deconstructing the located identity so that it also

embraces and enhances, MacDiarmid’s poem makes explicit processes that are naturalised

in Bunting’s. It underlines that fact that identity is constructed in relation to place via history,

and via a utilisation of the local site’s historical depth; but also it reveals how that process of

drawing upon historical depth relies on the use of cultural signifiers that are linked to the

local site by an investment of value and meaning.

MacDiarmid’s linguistic and symbolic construction of a located identity resonates

with processes found in Bunting’s later text. The way in which this common ground helps

define a British modernist poetics of place becomes clearer if we think about the very

different attitudes to textuality and language found in an American long modernist poem

such as Zukofsky's “A”. Given that Bunting and Zukofsky were long-term correspondents, and

that Bunting’s repeated insistence on the primacy of sound suggests a continued

self-identification with objectivist poetics, the comparison of their contrasting models of

language and identity is important. Whilst the British modernist poets ascribe language

depth by using it to invoke a cultural history, Zukofsky continually insists on the flatness and

materiality of language, as shown particularly in his processes of transliteration. Strictly

speaking, to transliterate is to ‘replace (letters or characters of one language) by those of

another used to represent the same sounds; to write (a word, etc.) in the characters of

another alphabet’.48 The process that Zukofsky uses several times in “A” takes this one step

further by translating the sound of one language into the existing vocabulary of another

(rather than merely into its alphabet). Bunting highlights the detachment of meaning and

47 Robert Crawford, Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1993), p. 44.

(30)

sound in this process: discussing Zukofsky's transliteration of the Book of Job he says that it

‘is just as much a translation as the words in the English Bible. . . . The one misses out the

meaning, the other misses out the sound’.49 The first two stanzas of this section (in “A”-15)

read as follows:

An

hinny

by

stallion

out of

she-ass

He neigh ha lie low h'who y'he gall mood

So roar cruel hire

Lo to achieve an eye leer rot off

Mass th'lo low o loam echo

How deal me many coeval yammer

Naked on face of white rock – sea,

Then I said: Liveforever my nest

Is arable hymn

Shore she root to water

Dew anew to branch.50

(31)

Since Zukofsky is transliterating into English words, this passage is not without meaning for

the English language reader. Yet the principal reason for Zukofsky's use of the words is not

their meaning or syntactical logic but their ability to mimic Hebrew sounds; the poem,

therefore, ‘consciously subordinates meaning to sound’.51

By stressing sound over meaning as a principle of translation, Zukofsky asserts that

language is a flattened soundscape that poetry playfully explores, rather than a system of

referential signifiers. This assertion of the depthlessness of language is continually reinforced

by Zukofsky – in his constant wordplay as well as in similar instances of transliteration – and

is the most obvious way of distinguishing his work from that of the British modernists. The

contrast between Zukofsky's use of language and a use that implies historical depth is

similarly made by Quartermain, who finds in Zukofsky's “A”-13 ‘the kind of pun that relies on

the suppression of history’.52 This detachment of language from history reflects a

detachment from place, just as Bunting and MacDiarmid's linguistic reliance on history

reflects their attachment to place. The assumptions frequently implicit in the way we talk

about depthless language clarify the link to a particular relationship with place. For instance,

Quartermain argues that the transliteration in Zukofsky's “A”-15 is imbued with

‘multidirectionalness’ and ‘rejects singularity in ways in which Briggflatts does not; for words

are loosened from syntactic structure and can range’.53 Whilst Quartermain's focus here is

on syntax, he implicitly asserts that differences in the treatment of language in these poems

51 Peter Jones, ‘Louis Zukofsky’, Poetry Nation, 5 (1975), 109-14 (p. 111). 52 Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics, p. 99.

53 Peter Quartermain, ‘Parataxis in Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky’, in Sharp Study and Long Toil, ed. by

(32)

are spatial, having to do with being located or dislocated. The idea of Zukofsky being able to

‘range’ within his language is based on a sense of Bunting's language being rooted in a place

and Zukofsky's being uprooted and capable of geographical movements.

This is clarified most fully when Bunting and MacDiarmid make their ascription of

depth explicit. This happens at various points in their texts, and the metaphors they use are

vital to understanding their treatment of language. In the following passage MacDiarmid's

discussion of selfhood in terms of a tension between surface and depth simultaneously

suggests two distinct discourses on identity:

For mine's the clearest insicht

O' man's facility

For constant self-deception,

And hoo his mind can be

But as a floatin' iceberg

That hides aneth the sea

Its bulk: and hoo frae depths

O' an unfaddomed flood

Tensions o' nerves arise

And humours o' the blood

– Keethin's nane can trace

To their original place.

Hoo many men to mak' a man

(33)

The comparison of the self to ‘a floatin' iceberg / That hides aneth the sea / Its bulk’ suggests

that the self is experienced as a duality of conscious, visible surface and unconscious,

unknowable depth. But the italicised lines seem to suggest that the self is a social and

cultural construct – that it takes ‘many men to mak' a man’. This de-essentialises selfhood in

a way that contradicts the sense of inaccessible depths; yet MacDiarmid holds the two

discourses together.

This becomes more interesting when MacDiarmid immediately applies the metaphor

to nationhood, and thus to the located Scottish identity his text manufactures:

But there are flegsome deeps

Whaur the soul o' Scotland sleeps

That I to bottom need

To wauk Guid kens what deid,

Play at stertle-a-stobie,

Wi' nation's dust for a hobby. (p.132)

The phrase ‘soul o' Scotland’ essentialises Scottishness, and again this essentialising relies on

the idea of depth (‘flegsome deeps’). As before, this coexists with a seemingly contradictory

discourse: MacDiarmid describes his own act of writing as ‘Play[ing] . . . / Wi' nation's dust

for a hobby’, undermining the idea of a ‘soul o' Scotland’ by suggesting that the poem

constructs Scottishness from historically referential materials (‘nation's dust’). In this

passage MacDiarmid shows how he is able to reconcile the two discourses. Buthlay's

(34)

132). This image suggests that whilst Scottishness lies dormant in the ‘flegsome deeps’ of

the past, MacDiarmid's need to ‘wauk Guid kens what dead’ involves bringing that historical

material to the surface – only then can he reconstruct Scottishness within the linguistic

surface of the poem. This is key to understanding MacDiarmid's attitude towards language,

which assumes historical depth but insists on the need for a self-conscious re-utilising of

those depths. It is because MacDiarmid views language in terms of this tension between

surface and depth that his text is able to invest language with historical signification, and in

this way participate in a constructive process of locating identity in a historically depthful

local site.

In Briggflatts a sense of the depthful quality of language is linked directly to the

physical ground of the local site. This underlines the fact that the contrast between the

depth model of MacDiarmid's Scots and the depthlessness model of Zukofsky's

transliteration has to do with their being writers of located and dislocated identities,

respectively. In the first part of Briggflatts, where an experience of the local site is

romanticised and celebrated, writing is, once more, presented as a masculinised act of

physical inscription:

A mason times his mallet

to a lark's twitter,

listening while the marble rests,

lays his rule

at a letter's edge,

fingertips checking,

(35)

naming none. (p. 13)

There is a tension over the permanency of this act of writing, because the stone is a

gravestone, and the writing of ‘a name / naming none’ is linked to the transitoriness and

decay envisaged elsewhere in this section. But the poem counterpoints that transitoriness

with its use of the landscape as an historical record, and the act of writing is presented as

being in line with that landscape (so that in the above lines the mason ‘times his mallet / to

a lark's twitter’). Ultimately, the presentation of writing as inscribing an epitaph understands

writing as a form of physical memory.

This understanding is possible precisely because of the links between the speaker

and the historical depth of his location. This becomes clearer as the poem's narrative moves

away from the local site, and we are given different views on the act of writing:

Who cares to remember a name cut in ice

or be remembered?

Wind writes in foam on the sea:

Who sang, sea takes,

brawn brine, bone grit.

Keener the kittiwake.

Fells forget him.

Fathoms dull the dale,

(36)

Brown argues that ‘[s]uch a passage grounds all personal and historical allusions in a

landscape’.54 The passage does this by contrasting the impermanency of ‘a name cut in ice’

or written ‘in foam on the sea’ with the previous section's image of a name written in stone.

In the second stanza the lines ‘Fells forget him. / Fathoms dull the dale’ suggest that the

speaker's travelling has detached him from the historical depth of the Northumbrian

landscape, and this is confirmed in the later lines ‘Something is lost / when wind, sun, sea

upbraid / justly an unconvinced deserter’ (p. 19). It is this detachment from the landscape

and its history that has caused the impermanence. Accordingly, ‘Fells forget him’ shows how

the landscape is posited as an historical record or memory. The word ‘upbraid’, meanwhile,

carries the immediate meaning of chastisement, but also is suggestive of an untangling or

unbraiding of the roots which allow access to that physical memory.

Later in the poem, Bunting makes more explicit the linking of historical record and

landscape, offering an image that crucially illustrates the poetics of place found in British

modernist long poems. He writes, ‘Today's posts are piles to drive into the quaggy past’ (p.

27), envisioning history as physically embodied in earth. The perceived depth of history is

here embedded in the physical depth of a landscape, and it is this complex depth to which

poem links writing as physical inscription. Furthermore, the phrase suggests the various

grades of solidity a poetics of place might encounter. Here, the historicised site is ‘quaggy’,

but when safely on home ground, Bunting and MacDiarmid encounter more substantial

historicised territory. In either case, the suggestion of surface and depth reveals a model of

place, identity, and text with which we may define the nationally-focused poetics loosely

grouped under the banner of British modernism.

(37)

History for Futurity: Paterson and Poetics of Place

My distinguishing thus far of a rooted British modernism from an uprooted American

modernism is a useful framework for reading the poets under discussion. The distinction is

complicated, though, by Ursula K. Hiese’s observation that, in the United States, ‘rootedness

in place has long been valued as an ideal counterweight to the mobility, restlessness,

rootlessness, and nomadism . . . often construed as paradigmatic of American national

character’.55 This reinforces my sense of a rootlessness typifying American modernism, yet

also reveals how this glosses over the parallel modernism committed to a poetics of place, as

expounded, in particular, by Olson and Williams. Though a thorough discussion of either

poet lies outside the scope of this article, I will conclude by looking at the first book of

Williams’s Paterson, thereby sketching some key ways in which the handling of identity,

locality, history, and language in the American long poem differs crucially from its British

counterpart, even whilst sharing notable features.

For Quartermain, the detachment of language from history links Zukofsky to

Williams, and is contextualised in both these poets by two specific experiences. The first of

these is learning English as a second language: Quartermain says that ‘both Williams and

Zukofsky learned English as their second language, and so are free to use English without the

clutter of history’.56 The second is living in America, and Quartermain argues that both

‘Williams and Zukofsky are . . . struggling to establish the American’.57 The first point reminds

us that Zukofsky’s rootlessness may be connected more to his Jewishness (and

55 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9.

(38)

speaking upbringing) than to his typifying of an American modernism; yet the second point

seems to refute this, underlining his depthlessness as belonging to Heise’s ‘American

national character’.58 In the case of Williams, the second point reminds us of affinities

between Paterson and the poems of Bunting and MacDiarmid; yet the first point asserts that

Williams’s writing of a located identity operates ahistorically, in marked contrast with the

British poets.

If Williams is ‘struggling to establish the American’ in Paterson, he achieves that

national goal, like Bunting, through a focus on an immediately experienced locale. Eric

Homberger thus suggests that the poem ‘is ultimately about the survival of the local as a

meaningful reality in American life’.59 Specifically, we might say that Williams stresses the

local environment as shaping the life of an individual, and vice versa:

. . . the city

the man, an identity – it can't be

otherwise – an

interpenetration, both ways.60

This interrelation between identity and place – ‘the man’ and ‘the city’ – offers one way of

reading the first main section, where Williams uses a number of different images to suggest

possible forms of this ‘interpenetration’. The opening image is a panoramic view of the city

depicted as a man:

58 Heise, p. 9.

59 Homberger, p. 119.

(39)

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passiac Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder

of the waters filling his dreams! (p. 6)

The last phrase of this passage ties the flow of the river to the flow of the personified city's

thoughts. Alongside this are depicted ‘machinations / drawing their substance from the

noise of the pouring / river’: here, the industries that use the river for power are also now

‘drawing their substance’ from the personified city's flow of thought. If we think of industrial

growth around a river as something that causes a city to develop in a particular place, the

image transforms the city's history into one human thought process.

Whilst the poem envisages the city as a sleeping man, ‘the man’ and ‘the city’ are

also symbolically related in other ways. James E. Breslin notes that ‘Paterson is both a

generic figure, all the citizens of the city of Paterson, and a particular person, who is a doctor

and a poet’.61 In the third of these devices, the personified city becomes a playful self-parody

of Williams himself: a Doctor whose ‘works / have been done into French / and Portugese’

(p. 9). As Williams conflates a version of himself with the poeticised place, the poem

becomes at least in part a kind of autobiography, comparable to Briggflatts, whose ‘[p]oet

appointed’ (p. 17) is at times an exaggerated Bunting. An additional link emerges as Williams

genders aspects of place, like Bunting expressing the relationship between self and locality in

terms of an interpersonal relationship governed by normalised gender roles. In Williams, the

61 James E. Breslin, William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.

(40)

city is given as male, and this is counterpointed by a feminisation of the surrounding

landscape: ‘And there, against him, stretches the low mountain. / The Park's her head,

carved above the Falls’ (p. 8). Though the essentialised link between femininity and

domesticity is not present here, Williams shares with Bunting the sense of the female as the

broader dwelling place for a specific, masculine located identity: thus, Paterson the poet-city

is nestled in ‘her monstrous hair / . . . scattered about into / the back country’ (p. 8). This

gendered arrangement is construed as harmonically mirroring the non-human surroundings,

where, comparably, ‘the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage’ (p. 8).

A further similarity between Briggflatts and Paterson is that both imply a view of

selfhood and written identity as structured. As I have outlined, Williams relates the

poet-city's flow of thought to the progression of the river towards, over, and away from the

Passaic Falls: ‘they leap to the conclusion and / fall, fall in air!’ (p. 8). That this is part of a

structured, located autobiography is suggested by Williams when describing his central

motif:

the course of the river whose life seemed more and more to resemble my own life as

I more and more thought of it: the river above the Falls, the catastrophe of the Falls

itself, the river below the falls, and the entrance at the end into the great sea.62

This structuring device is comparable to those used by Bunting, such as the comparison of

identity to the cycle of the four seasons. Both devices position identity in terms of a

combination of spatial and temporal axes; but, interestingly, Williams specifically undercuts

62 Williams, cited in Jerome Mazzaro, William Carlos Williams: The Later Poems (Ithaca: Cornell University

References

Related documents

At 5 days post infection (pi), five chickens of each group were sacrificed to observe morphological endogenous development of parasites by histopathological

[8] Yuan C, Zhang Y and Liu Z 2015 A survey on technologies for automatic forest fire monitoring, detection, and fighting using unmanned aerial vehicles and remote sensing

• Reverse engineering: To demonstrate the viability of the approach, we performed two case studies that reverse engineer the model migration, after the meta- model adaptation

This result however contradicts several other findings including those of Schaufeli and Baker (2003) who indicated that men score higher than women in all three aspects of work

The issue of aggregation across dimensions (that is to say, how we add up, for example, a measure of health with a measure of consumption of conventional goods),

Career services staff can benefit from spe- cific training to help them understand the unique issues that professional master’s students face in the career planning process....

Gains in post-test scores of students who completed the soil genesis and development online lessons were 69%. The large range in post-test score gains points to the critical

The shortest period binary known with main sequence components is GSC2314−0530 which we identified using SuperWASP as having a period of 0.1926 d (Norton et al.. This object